Alone But Not Abandoned

Many children whose mothers could not or did not care for them struggled with feeling alone, or that they didn’t deserve to be cared for.

Malky, today a working mother of four, remembers her childhood. “I always knew that I was chutzpahdik, impossible, and that no one had energy for me. No one realized that behind my wild behavior was a girl who didn’t see her mother for weeks on end, because her mother was constantly away on business trips. I was watched by a succession of teenaged babysitters, who focused on their homework, not on me, who would yell at me to be quiet, and who were constantly being replaced. Even when she was actually home, she would spend her time sleeping or relaxing from all of her hard work. Her harder job — raising me and my brother — was just not something she was capable of doing.

“My mother would say that it’s fine for me not to do homework and fail my tests,” Malky continues. “She’d point to herself and say, ‘Look how successful I am! I make so much money even without fourteen years of schooling.’ She answered all the teachers’ calls with a smile and then a dismissal.”

From the benefit of hindsight, Malky realizes that her mother was emotionally stunted. “Her mother passed away when she was a baby. She didn’t have the knowledge and the tools to be a normal mother. She loved me very much, I knew that, but it was all from a distance!”

But as a child, lacking that emotional awareness, Malky was desperate for support — which she didn’t receive. “I wish we had a warm support system for people who are suffering, for children in distress, so that they would receive more attention from people around them who see their struggles: a neighbor, teacher, aunt, counselor,” she says wistfully.

Chaya also suffered from those same feelings of shame, but says the support she did get from certain adults in her life gave her the ability to go on. “I had a teacher who took me under her wing and explained to me in simple terms that my mother wasn’t like the other mothers, and that I wasn’t to blame for it. Hearing that sentence saved me. A child tends to take the blame for everything, and if his mother hits him, or doesn’t form a connection to him, he assumes that he’s at fault.”

Chaya also had an elderly neighbor — a Holocaust survivor with a number on her arm — who recognized that Chaya needed her. “My mother often had seizures because of the shrapnel embedded in her brain,” Chaya relates. “During those episodes, I’d go downstairs to an elderly neighbor. Everything in her house was dirty and dusty, but she would give me a clean stool to sit on. She didn’t say a word, but let me put my head on her lap,” says Chaya. “She would say Tehillim, and after a while, tap me on the back, and I’d understand that I could go back home. She saved me. I knew I had someplace to go. That was all. And that was everything.”

Moments of connection also provided Chaya with a lifeline. At various points in her childhood, she was placed with different foster families. “Time and again, I had to get used to a new bed, a new home,” she remembers. “In one family’s house, I slept in the same room as a three-year-old girl. She’d wake me up every night and ask for a hug and a chocolate yoghurt. I loved those moments. I’d get up, get her a yoghurt, and give her a hug. She’d hug me back, and I felt that I was giving her what I so needed to receive. Hugging her was so empowering. Suddenly, I wasn’t the needy one. I could also give. Someone needed me and wanted my love.

“A few years ago, I met this girl, and she said to me, ‘Chaya! I remember your hugs!’ ”

Not a Life Sentence

Psychological literature suggests that people who had childhoods devoid of attention, love, and warmth, or who experienced parental violence or neglect, are more likely to have mental health challenges, more likely to self-harm, and their parenting skills are more likely to be compromised (Haj-Yahia, Sousa & Lugassi 2021). More specifically, mothers who underwent childhood trauma are more likely to have difficulty showing their children empathy, affection, and consistency (Tarczon, 2012).

Does it have to be this way? Can a mother who, in her childhood, didn’t receive love and warmth, was physically or emotionally neglected, create a warm and loving environment for her own children?

“The answer is a resounding yes,” says Chaya, who today is CEO of a nonprofit she founded that provides services for children from dysfunctional homes. “It may take her a long time to get there, but these mothers can get to a place where they are able to nurture her children.

“Someone who grew up in hunger or distress develops sensors that are especially attuned to someone else’s pain,” she says. “I once saw a short clip featuring a social experiment in which a teenaged boy walked through a pizza store, telling the diners he was hungry and asking for a slice of pizza. The diners refused politely.

“Outside the pizza store, someone had given one of the homeless men on the street a small pizza pie, and he began to gobble it up. A few minutes later, the same teenager approached him and asked for a slice. The man didn’t hesitate and gave him the last slice of pizza.

“In the clip, the teen asks the homeless man, ‘Why did you do it? Why did you give me the pizza? How did you know I was hungry?’

“ ‘I didn’t know, I felt it,’ the homeless man replied.

“That’s really how it is,” says Chaya. “When you’ve known lack, you develop the ability to feel someone else’s pain. I believe with emunah sheleimah that women who experienced a lack of nurturing from their mothers can learn to become the most nurturing mothers themselves.

“It’s complicated,” Chaya admits. “Women who didn’t receive this nurturing in their childhoods are sometimes so mired in their own issues that even if they do know how to detect their children’s emotional needs, they have no idea how to fill them.”

Chaya recalls once meeting a woman who had experienced severe emotional neglect as a child. This woman had an eight-year-old daughter she had no idea how to connect with. “It was as if she didn’t know the language of expressing love,” Chaya remembers. Her daughter started acting out — stealing, lying — and the mother wanted to take her for a psychological evaluation. At the same time, the young girl was desperately trying to form a connection to her mother — trying to hug her or touch her — and her mother, who didn’t have the ability to form this sort of bond, kept repelling her daughter’s efforts to come close.

Chaya brought this woman to a rav. The woman shared her daughter’s behavioral struggles with him, and said that she was losing her mind. “You need to understand one thing,” the rav told her. “Your daughter will never give up on your love. When you can give her love, all of her issues will be resolved.”

Initially, the woman bristled. She herself had long given up on this basic need for love, for a mother, for a sense of belonging, warmth. “After thinking about it, though, she calmed down,” Chaya relates. “She realized there was still hope. There was still a chance she could be the real mother her mother had never been.”

But how can someone who’s never been given love develop the tools and emotional awareness to give it to someone else? Rav Eliyahu Bensimon, a maggid shiur and head of the Shleimus Hamishpachah Bais Hora’ah, quotes Rav Eliyahu Dessler in Kuntress Habechirah. “Every person has a nekudas bechirah, a point at which his free choice begins, where he wages battle over making the right choice,” Rav Bensimon explains. “There are areas a person has already conquered. There, he no longer has bechirah because he no longer faces a challenge. On the other hand, there are places where he still doesn’t have a foothold and so has no potential for victory. The challenge is to slowly and steadily capture more and more nekudos bechirah territory and turn them into ‘occupied areas.’ From there, he can advance to another higher and more difficult point of bechirah.

“So can a person who didn’t receive warmth and love as a child fill his children’s emotional needs?” Rav Bensimon continues. “From a hashkafic perspective, it’s certainly possible that there are behaviors that aren’t on the spectrum of abilities of this person for now. But if the person understands that he is obligated to work on moving his nekudas habechirah, then through therapy and honest self-assessment he can expand his abilities to nurture his children.”

Treatment Is Possible

“IT’Simportant to remember that the wider environment also contributes to a child’s development and provides children with other opportunities to be nurtured,” says Dr. Shalva Paley, a clinical psychologist at Hadassah Ein Kerem’s Adolescent Psychiatric Day Care unit.

She also reassures mothers who are concerned that because of the emotional neglect they experienced during childhood, they won’t be able to forge an emotional connection with their children or nurture them. “Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Dr. Donald Woods Winnicott was famous for saying, ‘There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.’ A baby has a caretaker. A baby is born with instinctive skills to create an emotional bond with his primary caregiver, and a mother has natural mechanisms to give love to her baby,” she says.

“As long as the child doesn’t experience rejection, he’ll continue to develop properly, in an emotionally healthy way. So when a mother comes to my clinic and tells me she can’t give her child what she didn’t get, the first thing I do is ask her: ‘Is your child expressing any distress? Does he have any problems?’ If everything’s fine, she might be projecting her own deprivation onto her child, who’s actually getting all his needs met. Or maybe she’s saying, ‘I’m not able to touch my own emotional world.’ If so, then this is a chance for her to seek treatment, to learn to meet her own emotional needs.”

Sometimes, the mother does report that her child is presenting with emotional issues. “In such a case, dyadic therapy — with the mother and child together — can be wonderfully effective,” Dr. Paley says. “If she isn’t able to connect to her child, and the child encounters her rejection, then a conflict develops: He wants and needs contact and connection with all his being, but he’s afraid of being hurt. That’s how various disorders develop, such as social anxiety, difficulty forging meaningful connections, and even schizoid personality disorder (when a person refrains from all connection). In such cases, good therapy, where the mother and child work together, can create a new and healthy emotional space between them.

“In addition to investing in developing her child’s emotional world and making herself available for her child, it’s important for the parent to remember to also care for her own emotional needs.”

In Real Time

IT takes some effort not to either repeat the dysfunctional patterns a woman was raised with or overcompensate for them in a way that is smothering.

Ruti, a preschool teacher by profession, is a mother of six children. On the surface, her childhood home had looked fine. Her father was a prominent maggid shiur, and they were financially comfortable due to her mother’s high-powered job — but she and her eight siblings lived, in Ruti’s words, in a freezer. “My mother never hugged or kissed us. She didn’t take an interest in our lives. She didn’t consider basic needs such as toys as important. When I was five, we had a siddur play, and the teacher asked each girl to bring a doll as a prop. I didn’t have a doll. I had no toys. I asked my friend Chavi if I could borrow a doll. She took me into her room — a pink room with hearts on the walls, something I could have never even imagined. She showed me her doll box and went to ask her mother if she would let me borrow one.

“I heard her whispering to her mother: ‘But why doesn’t she have her own doll?’ and her mother whispered back, ‘Maybe they’re poor.’ That exchange echoed in my head for months. When I grew a bit older, I realized that even poor people can buy cheap toys or can get them from gemachim. But my mother didn’t have any tools to give me. Why? Maybe it was the chain of the generations, which began with my grandmother having her childhood cut off by the Holocaust.

“My mother didn’t scream at us, and she certainly never hit us. But if I cried, she’d say, ‘Enough! Stop acting like such a baby!’ That was the atmosphere. It’s not something I can explain with words. We just had to stop feeling, immediately.”

When she had children, Ruti found herself overcompensating. By the time her oldest daughter turned one, she had bought her 17 dolls.

“Every day I told each child how much I love them,” Ruti relates. “I never got angry. I struggled to set boundaries. After bedtime each day, I’d collapse. I never had energy to go out to simchahs or events — I didn’t even have energy left to schmooze with my husband! And if I ever thought my husband might be neglecting the kids’ needs, even a teeny, tiny drop, I was livid.

“When my fifth child was born, I fell apart,” Ruti continues. “I started going to therapy, and only once I began to nurture myself did I realize the madness I was living in. While I was trying frantically to give my children what I’d missed out on, they really could handle a bit of me letting go. That is where my work began — to feel, to understand myself, and slowly, slowly, also to let go.”

Malky found healing in directly addressing those unmet needs with her mother. “One day, I sat down to talk to my mother,” she says. “She’s less restless, she doesn’t travel anymore. She’s the kindest mother I know, and she’s ready to listen. I told her gently, respectfully, about the babysitters. About the longing. About the void I lived with. My mother was pained and stunned by what I told her. It had been so clear to her that she had given us everything in our childhood —and she was right technically but not emotionally. But after her initial shock, she just hugged me and fell silent.

“I think that for me that was the essence of kibbud horim,” Malky says. “I was able to become truly close to my mother, not just a fake act. Today I can understand that, yes, there is tremendous love in the mother-child relationship, but sometimes, there are boulders along the way. Halevai we should be able to look past them, to see the love that is there.”

Her self-awareness has helped Malky be there for her own children. “One of my children struggles in school,” she relates. “It would have been so easy for me to fall into the patterns of my past and release myself of any obligations to help him. But I didn’t. I called his rebbeim, I requested modified lessons, and I got him a tutor. When his rebbeim told me that he has social issues, I took him for social skills training. Slowly, he formed a group of friends, and he was thrilled. At the end of the year, his rebbi told me that you can tell that this boy ‘is the son of a mother who cares.’ I felt like I’d gotten a medal.”

Many of these women have found healing in giving — their own children and helping others.

Years later, as a successful adult, Chaya went back to the bakery where the owner had yelled at her. “I came full circle,” she says. “I came to him so he could see what I am today — strong, capable — and told him what happened all those years ago. He was aghast and could not believe the story was about him. He asked if he could give me everything in the bakery. I told him I want nothing for myself. But I want him to send knishes to hungry children every day. And if a child ever asks for food, I want him to give.

“That wound still hurts, but I’m not operating from a place of pain anymore,” says Chaya. “Today I’m the CEO of an organization I established, Hema (an acronym for ha’atzamah mitoch hakshavah, empowerment through listening). What a child needs more than anything else is to be heard.”

“Today, I look at my children,” Ruti says, “the children whose souls I nurtured, and I’m astonished. It wasn’t always easy. I often thought to myself, I grew up like this, so this is how it’s going to be going forward. It’s so easy for me to keep them at a distance. I had to learn how to give and give some more. But I also had to learn that the fuller I am, the more I fargin myself, the more I’ll be able to give to my family.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 913)